Nigerian Government Partners with Morocco on Artificial Intelligence Farm Surveillance Initiative, Aiming to Cover 15 Regions

The Federal Government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding to deploy a satellite- and artificial intelligence-powered agricultural monitoring platform, providing states and local governments with real-time data and intelligence on Nigeria's agricultural land, crop distribution, production performance, and emerging food security risks.

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This move is in line with the Presidency's declaration that the country must adopt emerging agricultural technologies and build its own capability to improve and adapt them to its national conditions, as stated by Deputy Chief of Staff to the President, Senator Ibrahim Hadejia.

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Hadejia signed the agreement on behalf of the Federal Government at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco, alongside representatives of OCP Africa and Ground Truth Analytics, as part of the Presidential Food Systems Coordinating Unit's efforts to improve agricultural productivity.

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According to a statement by Marion Moon, Technical Assistant on Agriculture to the President, the agreement launched Nigeria's first satellite-powered national crop monitoring system and marked the formal launch of the National Agro-Productivity System, designed to provide real-time, AI-generated intelligence on crop yields, land availability, and food security threats nationwide.

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The National Agro-Productivity System is a platform that will strengthen seasonal planning, agricultural investment, productivity monitoring, and policy coordination by providing federal and state governments with timely, reliable, and actionable agricultural intelligence to support better decision-making, as explained by Hadejia.

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Hadejia emphasized that the ambition behind the NAPS exceeds technology deployment, aiming to build a Nigerian capability that is adapted to the country's conditions, understood and managed by its institutions, supported by Nigerian expertise, and sustained through knowledge transfer, institutional capacity development, and continuous learning.

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Marion Moon explained that the NAPS is the Federal Government's response to a persistent and costly information gap between what Nigerian farmers declare they will produce and what actually emerges from the field by harvest time, highlighting the need for stronger visibility during the season.

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Moon noted that this misalignment is not merely a logistical inconvenience but also a structural defect in how food policy is made in the country, where domestic production happens at the subnational level while trade policy decisions are made at the federal level.

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The National Agribusiness Policy Mechanism, the framework within which NAPS operates, is a four-pillar system built around domestic production, reserves, imports, and exports, providing a food balance for Nigeria, as described by Moon.

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The NAPM was approved by the National Council on Agriculture and Food Security in November 2024 and has since been piloted across 13 states, covering all three planting seasons, reaching 250,000 farmers, surveying more than 50,000, covering more than 2,000 communities, and collecting over one million data points across the food balance.

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Chief Executive Officer of OCP Africa, Alafifi Laadel, described the agreement as a generational commitment rather than a standard procurement arrangement, reflecting a shared commitment to building long-term capability through knowledge transfer, local capacity development, and strong institutions.

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Laadel explained that the NAPS technology replaces boots on the ground with AI and digital tools to read the data, providing a more efficient and accurate way of monitoring agricultural productivity.

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Chief Executive Officer of Ground Truth Analytics, Driss Kitane, demonstrated how the technology will close the mid-season visibility gap, using a Kano State demonstration to show how AI algorithms ingest raw satellite imagery and automatically delineate every agricultural parcel, identify the crop growing on each one, and track its growth stage without manual input.

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Kitane explained that the images refresh every five days, allowing for coverage of all seasons and observation of the growth stage of each crop, with the capability to predict national wheat production three months before harvest with 90 to 95 per cent accuracy.

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On data sovereignty, Kitane assured that everything developed is sovereign to Nigeria, hosted on Nigerian servers, with all sensitive data staying on those servers and no one able to access the data unless Nigeria decides so.

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Kitane outlined a three-phase implementation, including a minimum viable product covering one state, with land-cover analysis for additional states, followed by an expansion to three states with full crop intelligence and land cover for 15 states, and then a complete multi-season monitoring across all 15 priority states.

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UM6P President and Director General Hicham El Habti received the Nigerian delegation at the University, disclosing that Nigeria already has an outsized presence in the institution's student population, with 60 per cent of its students being Nigerian.

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The signing comes exactly three years after President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency on food security in July 2023, following the removal of the petrol subsidy and the unification of the naira exchange window, which triggered a food inflation spiral that pushed the cost of staples beyond the reach of millions of households.

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At its peak in early 2025, Nigeria's food inflation exceeded 40 per cent year-on-year, among the highest globally, with UNICEF estimating that over 31.8 million Nigerian children under five are acutely malnourished, the second-highest burden in the world after India.

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The Federal Government delegation in Morocco included representatives from the Office of the Vice President, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Federal Ministry of Justice, the National Space Research and Development Agency, the Nigeria Governors' Forum, and other agencies supporting implementation of the National Agro-Productivity System.